I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long?  Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died.  Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news.  Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is.  In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate.  That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

CONTINUED at PJ Media.

The Libertarian Party has struggled with its identity since its founding in 1971. Technically America’s third largest political party, the LP’s political efforts have often made it seem like America’s Third Largest Debate Club. The LP has elected only a handful of its members to state legislatures, and elected no candidates to federal office. In 2008, the party broke with tradition by nominating a carpetbagging repentant drug warrior, former Republican congressman Bob Barr, whose nomination over LP mainstay and perennial candidate for office Mary Ruwart nearly tore the party in half.

It appears the party has found a balance with the nomination of former two-term New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson for president and Judge Jim Gray of California for vice president. Both men are former Republican officeholders with high media profiles, both are committed libertarians, and both won their respective nominations at the Libertarian National Convention in Las Vegas by large margins and after only one round of voting.

Yet shortly after confetti cannons fired celebratory glitter directly in front of C-SPAN’s cameras, the party resumed its internal squabbling, and a confusing and frustrating fight over who would chair the Libertarian National Committee lasted two days. Eventually, a candidate from the more purist wing of the party, Geoff Neale, won out, defeating two candidates from the more electorally focused wing of the party. LP delegates then cleaned house, replacing every party officer.

With the LP slated to have its highest profile presidential ticket since Ed Clark and David Koch ran together in 1980, hundreds more candidates running for lower offices across the country, and Americans more interested in libertarian ideas than ever before, the Party of Principle still has some questions it needs to answer. Can it qualify for the ballot in all 50 states? Can members stop fighting each other over who is more libertarian? Can the Libertarian National Committee do its job?

Can the LP qualify for the ballot in all 50 states?

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Mike Riggs & Garrett Quinn.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

I had a long weekend but it is now over. My time in Gainesville with my cousin and friends was a blast, as I haven’t actually been partying too hard over the last month. This trip was a good way for me to drown in bourbon, Irish whiskey, tequila, Long Islands, Guinness, ginger beer and Pabst. I’ve been trying to be healthier in an attempt to lose weight and potentially live a somewhat longer life but even with my more health conscious attitude, my inner party monster still needs to be entertained and unleashed every now and again. What better time than with other party monsters that I genuinely cherish in a wild college town during graduation weekend? There was no point in taking any prisoners, as we ran roughshod over downtown Gainesville leaving no bottle unturned. A few days later, my stomach still hurts and my head is still swimming in a sea of 86 proof delirium – a special shout out goes to 1.75 liters of Old Crow Reserve.

To those who might find my more health conscious behavior a bit unsettling, there is no need to worry. It’s not called selling out when you do it because your liver hurts and you’ve been pissing blood. The blood part was not related to the booze but it was still a wake up call to straighten my shit out some what. Have no fear though, I will not go soft and become a shell of my former self like so many writers and artists who went clean only for their work to suffer and lose its appeal. Trent Reznor immediately comes to mind, although his Academy Award for a very boring and minimalist film score probably proves me wrong but only if you take the Academy seriously and turn a blind eye to their petty politics.

Anyway, my first night in Gainesville on this latest trip was intense. It started almost immediately with two Guinness Draughts and four Long Island iced teas while I watched my friends play pool. I didn’t participate in the contest because I was enjoying my own game of drown the writer in the dark and dingy corner of smoke and neon light. It is a one-player game but the odds are always steep and the challenge is never dull. Needless to say, I won the bout and went on to fight in other bouts in other venues for the remainder of the 48 hour tournament.

The weekend wasn’t all about completely succumbing to vices however. I mean, I never came across any other substances to entertain myself with and that’s fine, the booze was enough. I did get to spend a lot of the time talking politics and economics with the college kids, some of them a part of the Occupy Gainesville movement. Now while we didn’t see eye-to-eye on solutions, we did agree on the vast majority of the problems. My job, from my standpoint, was to try and get them to understand that you can’t just blame the banks for the madness. The government is just as responsible as is the Federal Reserve. Truth is, they were really receptive to a lot of the things I was saying. Now I had half a dozen conversations with a dozen or more people but for the most part, other than two or three close-minded joiners, they got what I was saying and left the conversations with the intent to look into their new perspective on these matters themselves. One of them even promised to pick up some of the books I wrote down for him on a napkin (titles by Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman and more modern authors Jeffrey Tucker and Stefan Molyneux – who has a ton of free e-books).

One interesting thing I discovered among talking to multiple college kids, is that their only real beef with Ron Paul is his pro-life stance. I told them that it is an issue I also disagree with Dr. Paul on. However, I told them that if you look at the rest of his platform and like it, writing him off over one issue is a bit careless. Especially since Dr. Paul thinks that it should be an issue left up to states and not the federal government regardless of his personal opinion on it. Most of these kids understood that but had a hard time envisioning a country were states’ rights were protected, at least on this issue. I explained that you cannot pick and choose issues and that the rule had to apply with everything. If you make one exception, you will make plenty more. They got and respected it but still had a bug in their ass about it and I get that. I then spoke to them about Gary Johnson who is basically a clone of Ron Paul policy-wise but is pro-choice instead of pro-life. Most of the people I talked to had not heard of Johnson and were actually pretty excited upon finding out his stance on the abortion issue. They also liked that Gary Johnson was not a Democrat or a Republican. I didn’t bring up all the issues they said they had with Obama however, as there were a lot more than what they had with Paul. Regardless of this, they will probably vote for Obama again even though they claim they are opposed to war, Gitmo and a plethora of other issues he has failed them on.

Now don’t get me wrong, not everyone was cordial. There were those few dumb bastards in the mix and fucking with them and sending them off in a self-conlficted rage was quite amusing. One kid was calling for anarchy and at the same time was calling for government to step in and regulate the banks more. Point is, this kid’s whole world-view was completely hypocritical. On one hand, this kid (and those like him) want to scream “Fuck the man!” and “Fuck the police!” while on the other hand want the government (the man and the police) to step in and regulate everything even more than they do now. I don’t understand how so many young people can’t seem to make a correlation between these two things? You want the government who is bought and paid for by the banks to regulate the banks? You can’t see how this is completely asinine, let alone how this is what has caused all these problems to begin with? Your solution to the problem is more of the problem itself? Does the meth addict break the cycle by taking more meth? No, the meth addict dies! Common sense is like a disease in the hipster socialist-anarchist psyche.

The ones who are so passionate in their ignorance don’t even care about the real crux of the problem. They want to continue to buy into their conflicted and hypocritical indoctrination and smash anyone who doesn’t swim in their sea of shit. On top of that, they don’t want to better themselves, they want to stay at the bottom so they can continue to bitch as they wallow in dirt and filth because if they were to try and actually get out of it, they’d be outed as a “sell out” or even worse a “hard-working capitalist pig consumer”. Yep, keep pointing your Djarum-clutching fingers as you slur your PBR-soaked words kiddies.

Not all is lost on the generation after mine however. Amongst the sea of those I dealt with, only a few were bad apples and completely hopeless. I remember myself at that age, as I had a similar view of the world. It was someone challenging me on my preconceived notions that got me to pay attention and learn how this whole game really works. If at least one of those kids breaks free from the mold and is affected by our encounter, my debt is repaid. I enjoyed the friendly and civil debates and even had fun with the assholes. In the end, it is about standing your ground and living by your own code not the code of some undefined group whose ideology is lesser than the sum of its parts.

I got home, feeling pretty good about how most of the weekend went down. I also felt great for ignoring my responsibilities for a few days while not even paying attention to what was going on in the news. I didn’t really miss anything, other than Rick Santorum finally wiping away his bitch tears to endorse Mitt Romney, which just gave me flashbacks to 2008 when he was riding that Romney train hard. Something tells me that if I had the same debates with Santorum supporters that I had with the college youth of Gainesville, it wouldn’t have been as civil. I hope that all of those sweater-vests the Santorumites bought up like quaaludes at a disco are constructed of Iranian dog hair and Chinese asbestos. It would be the perfect ending to such a vile group of people.

Newt Gingrich ends his White House dream today with his political committee facing a mountain of debts — owing about $4 million to scores of businesses and campaign workers around the country who fear they will never get paid.

Campaign watchdogs said the size of Gingrich’s debt is extraordinary — and could have been avoided if the candidate and his team had been more disciplined.

“He was reckless in running up these bills, especially in the last month or so of the campaign when it was quite clear that Mitt Romney would be the nominee,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the watchdog group Citizen Union.

The campaign has been dogged by financial problems since last summer, but its cash crunch accelerated in recent weeks. It finished March with $4.3 million in debts, an alarming increase from $1.5 million at the end of February, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The campaign raised $1.6 million in March, spent $2 million and reported having $1.2 million cash on hand.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.

Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department.

Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

Here is how it works.

The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians.

CONTINUED at the NY Post.

An Exclusive interview, Alex Jones speaks with Sen. Rand Paul on NDAA, TSA undercover on Houston busses, Obama’s overall neglect of the Constitution, his possible impeachment and much more. This is a must see video.

So the presidential campaign is shaping up as a contest between a Democrat who says we had a free market from 2001 through 2008 and a Republican who . . . agrees—he says “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” You can’t cease to be something you never were.

Thus Barack Obama claims and Mitt Romneyimplicitly concedes that the free market 1) has existed and 2) therefore presumably created the housing and financial debacle. This bodes ill for advocates of liberty and voluntary exchange.

Notice what will happen if this framing is widely accepted: Genuinely freed markets won’t make the list of feasible options. That will leave us with mere variations on a statist theme, namely, corporatism. How will voters choose among them? Most of those who abhor “socialism” (however they define it) will rally round Republican corporatism because of the pro-market rhetoric, while most who abhor the cruel “free market” (“Look at the hardship it created!”) will rush to Democratic corporatism because of its anti-market rhetoric.

And the winner will be: Corporatism. (That is, the use of government force primarily to benefit the well-connected business elite.) The loser? The people, who would benefit from freedom and freed markets—markets void of privileges and arbitrary decrees. That’s what maximizes consumer and worker bargaining power and enhances general living standards.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Sheldon Richman.

Secretive cabal selected John Edwards as Kerry’s number 2 in 2004.

A story in today’s Washington Post written by veteran columnist Al Kamen suggests that the Bilderberg Group may have a decisive role to play in picking Mitt Romney’s running mate, continuing a recent trend in which the secretive cabal has had a direct influence on the U.S. presidential election.

Kamen has been writing for the Washington Post for over three decades and also worked with Watergate icons Woodward and Bernstein, suggesting the title of his column, “In the loop,” has some meaning behind it.

Kamen remarks on how both President Obama and Hillary Clinton are heading to the Summit of the Americas this weekend in Cartagena, Colombia to meet with over 30 other heads of state. They will be joined by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been touted as a potential VP having endorsed Mitt Romney last month.

“Curiously, not many senators seem to be going. In fact, it may be that the only one going from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a possible vice presidential pick, who we’re told is flying commercial to attend,” writes Kamen, adding that Rubio’s presence could “help boost his foreign-policy chops” just as a visit with the clandestine Bilderberg Group was key in John Edwards being picked as John Kerry’s number two in 2004.

“Reminds us of a foreign jaunt made by another potential vice presidential pick back in 2004. That would be John Edwards , whose criminal trial is set to begin Thursday in Greensboro, N.C. Edwards gave a speech in June 2004 at the Bilderberg conference that was widely credited as one reason John Kerry chose him,” writes Kamen.

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

So it has finally happened! Rick Santorum has pulled out of the GOP race! If only his father would’ve pulled out back in the day, all of us wouldn’t have had to deal with his ignorant gay-hating Jesus-lusting bullshit. It couldn’t have come at a better time as it happened on the second anniversary of TheSwash.com’s existence. Of course, we at the Swash take full credit for Ricky Baby dropping out because if it wasn’t for our relentless yet factual articles exposing the man’s insanity, he could have been the frontrunner. You’re welcome America.

There is a down side to all of this however. First of all, the biggest jackass the Republican Party has had as a serious contender in years is now gone and won’t be in our faces on a daily basis to remind us as to why many Republicans are completely fucking looney. We’ve also lost the funniest guy in the race because no one can put their damn foot in their mouth like the Duke of Dork Dicks can. Truth is, I’ve been on this guy like a fly on shit since May of 2011 and I can finally relax and direct my sights elsewhere. Sure, there is still Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to contend with but no matter how useless they would be as POTUS, no one would have been as bad as Rick Santorum.

There’s not much else I can say about this piece of shit’s fall from grace. I knew that this day would come and I expected to have a long yet satisfied rant about the situation but I’ve pulled the layers back on this shithead for so long that I’m done with him. I’m incredibly ecstatic about all of this but at the same time, I’m going to miss my favorite punching bag. Well, Newt’s fucking hopeless at this point, so I guess it’s time to really start hitting Mr. Romney under the chin.

I guess this is good news for Ron Paul, as he is still hanging on. In all honesty though, I don’t think that this will have much of an effect on the Paul campaign. I think that the race is over for the good doctor and at this point, Romney is so far ahead of the competition that unless Paul or Gingrich can magically acquire Santorum’s 275 delegates, they don’t stand a chance. Even then however, if such a miracle were to happen, the benefactor of that miracle would still be well behind Romney. Even if you add all of Santorum’s lost delegates to Paul’s and Gingrich’s, the number is still dwarfed by Romney. We all should have known that Rick’s days in this race were numbered and with that, we all should have known that Mitt has had this contest locked up for a good month now.

It is now truly over folks. I’m not going to sit around on the Internet all night fantasizing and speculating like all the other Ron Paul supporters that believe that this has some how opened the floodgates. It’s a great day in America with Santorum tapping out like an amateur grappling with George St-Pierre but it is also still a dark day because we are left with an Obama versus Romney situation. So unless you are a progressive hipster or a neocon crybaby, this November is going to be a lose/lose situation. Don’t say I didn’t call this one back in 2008.

This video goes out to Rick Santorum. In the words of Kenny Fucking Powers, “You’re fucking out!”

My Two Cents: What a great bday present for The Swash and its readers! End Two Cents.

Rick Santorum is suspending his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, clearing a path for Mitt Romney to become the nominee.

A Republican close to the campaign says the former Pennsylvania senator was to make the announcement Tuesday in his home state of Pennsylvania, two weeks before the GOP presidential primary there. Santorum faced a tough fight in his home state against Romney.

Source: AP.